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Soundlife Seattle Review
July 21, 1998

Review: Hanson fans soak it up at Seattle concert

Kathleen Merryman; The News Tribune

Hanson, the three brothers who've gone from Tulsa to the top of the charts with their sweet lyrics and polished harmonies, met 15,000 of their Washington fans Tuesday night.

And the result was: noise.

On their CDs, Hanson's charm lies in the scale of their music. They write the songs about things they know about or wonder about. "Yearbook," for example, is a meditation on a boy who doesn't have his picture in the yearbook. "MMMBop," the hit you'll be hearing in elevators for the next 30 years, is happy, bouncy harmony.

On stage, the thrill for a capacity KeyArena crowd was finally being able to see the boys in person. That meant it was fine to scream, fine to never sit down, fine to generate adrenaline by the gallon.

Hanson made the most of the frenzy. They're filming and taping for a video and a live album, and cameramen roamed the stage throughout the concert. They looked properly industrial among the set pieces modeled on oil derricks - a tribute to the oil business their father worked at in Tulsa.

Rather than fight the screaming, the brothers built a show that stood up to the frenzy. Instead of limiting themselves to the songs on their three commercial CDs - one of which is a Christmas collection - they included hits from the 1960s and 1970s. As any good Hanson fan knows, they listened to those songs at home, sang with them and developed their harmonies around them.

Opening with "So Glad We Made It," ("Gimme Some Lovin'") they moved into "On the Wings of An Eagle." ("Thinking of You")

In polished rock star style, Taylor complimented the audience, saying, "Man, I can already tell you guys know how to rock."

Which was a given. The girls knew all the words to all his songs.

At 15, Taylor is the band's lead singer, keyboard player and spokesman. He's also remarkably energetic. Trained in classical piano, he can play the keyboard and sing while stamping and jumping with the music - for 90 minutes straight.

He was airborne during most of "Where's the Love?"

For a 15-year-old, he's remarkably poised and managed to do what a few thousand parents could not: persuade the crowd not to scream, if just for a song or two, including "Weird."

Some girls did use that relative silence to yell, "I love you Taylor," or "I love you Zac" or "I love you Isaac."

Five songs into the show, the set switched from oil derricks to three panels representing the Hansons' three-car garage. Isaac, 18 and the guitarist, sat in an easy chair, and 12-year-old Zac had his drums for "Stories" and "Madeline."

Then wild child, goofball Zac zoomed out, zoomed back with a giant Super Soaker and doused the crowd clear up to row 20.

It was Taylor, again, who calmed the delirious crowd for "Ever Lonely" and "I Will Come to You."

For "MMMBop," the crowd, moms and dads included, proved that it is, in fact, physically impossible to stay seated during a live performance of the song. They danced and clapped while Taylor switched from keyboard to bongos and back again.

By the end, the boys were still jumping, and stagehands had refilled their Super Soakers. That meant that all three had them, and all three did what any teen filled to the gills with energy might do: They had a giant water fight before they called for silence and said goodnight with a few sweet, a cappella bars from "Weird."

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